Kabale und Liebe | Intrigue and Love

Schiller was only 25 years old when he wrote Intrigue and Love. He was an indignant young man who wrote a play about the first love, and a depraved world in which this love cannot exist. 230 years later many young men and women watch this play as Intrigue and Love is read in schools. What does this famous tragedy tell them today?

A forbidden love between an aristocrat and a commoner is no longer a scandal since most future kings in Europe come from a middle-class family. Insofar our world is no longer comparable to Schiller’s world. But maybe we can understand the young writer’s fury: corruption, self-interest, lie, intrigue, and political murder are the means in politics, and the young disappointedly turn away from their fathers.

What does the generation of the fathers represent, and what advice can they give to the young? And why has this bourgeois tragedy been so important for theatre to this day? These are the questions Anselm Weber takes as a starting point for the staging of one of the most famous German plays.